Hell

Hell, Revisited

a sermon on Luke 16.19-31 by David C. Mauldin Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

You could sit in a Presbyterian pew for a long time and not hear a sermon about hell. Some churches, and there is no need to name them, put major emphasis on hell. Preachers threaten people with it every week. Presbyterians mention it rarely or never. I can think of two reasons why. Some may not believe in hell. That’s not my reason. I believe in hell, and I mention it from time to time, but I rarely dwell on it. My reason is: I simply prefer to take a more positive approach. And this for a couple of reasons. First, most people resist being scared into commitment. I trust God to work in each person’s heart. I don’t need to manipulate anyone. Second, reading the sermons in the Book of Acts, I find the apostles didn’t employ a fire and brimstone strategy. Like them, I would rather focus on what God can do with your life than on the alternative.

Hell is an important part of the Christian faith, and we do ourselves a disservice if we simply ignore it. Either you believe in hell, or you do not. If you do, then you should probably mention it from time to time, just for the sake of being honest and open. If you do not … well, that seems like something people would be relieved to hear. I believe a good preacher will talk about hell about as much as the New Testament does. This means you don’t get a steady diet of it, but it does come up from time to time, and there is a time to dig into the topic and teach what scripture teaches about it. This is what I plan to do today.

Some of you, I suspect, have spent time listening to preachers with a gift for describing hell in vivid terms. When they preach you can almost feel the flames licking up through the floor of the church. I heard a preacher once who knew another preacher who knew someone who had seen hell. At least that’s how the story went. If that is what you are expecting this morning, you’re in for a treat. That’s not my style. I know I am missing a good opportunity to show off my rhetorical skills. Look at Dante. His book about hell is gripping reading while his book about paradise makes you wonder why anyone would want to go there. I’m not Dante, and I’m not Jonathan Edwards, whose famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” still stands at the head of the genre of old fashioned hellfire preaching. He exclaimed:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire. … O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: ’tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God … you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it.”

Edwards’s sermons have always struck me as the boring lecture type, but I’ll wager no one in his congregation was dozing that day!

What I want to do is think through the doctrine of hell with you: What is hell? How does it fit with what we believe about God? And what might it mean to a modern Christian to believe in hell?

We start with a little background. The common conception of hell as a place or state of eternal punishment after death is alien to the Old Testament. In the Old Testament we find references to Sheol, which is sometimes translated as Hades. This is simply the abode of the dead. No reward. No punishment. Just a shadowy state of nonexistence. Judaism developed a doctrine of hell in the time between the Old and New Testaments.
It grew out of their beliefs about God and their experiences of the world. Jews believed God was all powerful, all knowing, and just. They knew God would punish the wicked and reward the righteous. The problem was, their faith didn’t square with their experience of the world. We have talked about this before when I explained why Jews expected God to raise the righteous from the dead. Some people deserved better than they got in this life, and most Jews came to expect God to set things right. If God didn’t do that in this life, he must do it in the next. It is a short step from believing God will reward the righteous after death to also believing God will punish the wicked after death. Their convictions about God’s justice created a hole in their theology, and the idea of hell filled the hole perfectly.

By the time of the New Testament, the doctrine of hell enjoyed wide acceptance. Some, such as the Sadducees, did not believe in any sort of afterlife, but most Jews did. What is important for us Christians is Jesus’ teachings on the subject and what the New Testament has to say. I want to survey the gospel passages that deal with hell. You will see as we go along that these passages rely on word pictures and that the key concept behind all of them is the idea of being outside. After the survey, I will suggest how this New Testament understanding of hell fits with our belief in a loving God. We need to see how the two fit together. After all, Jesus is the one who taught us the magnitude of God’s love, and yet he also seemed to believe in hell. Let’s look at what he had to say.

Jesus’ teachings on the subject fall into two categories: things he said about hell and stories he told about judgment. We need both for a good understanding. First, things he said about hell. There are four of these sayings.

In Matthew 5.22 Jesus warns that calling your brother or sister a fool can make you liable to the hell of fire. In Matthew 5.29-30, also found in Mark 9.43-47, Jesus speaks on the seriousness of sin, saying, “It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” Matthew 10.28 and Luke 12.5 advise us to fear God, who alone is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. And finally, in Matthew 23.13-15, Jesus says, “Woe to you Pharisees … you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven”—notice the reference to being outside—then he calls them “sons of hell.”

When you read “hell” in these passages, the Greek word is ghenna. And there is a story behind this word. It comes from the Hebrew phrase “the Valley of Himmon.” This is an actual place. During biblical days the city of Jerusalem was just north of this valley. In the time of the kings, sacrifices to foreign gods were offered there, including child sacrifices. Kings Ahaz and Manasseh are remembered for having sacrificed their children there to the god Molech. Naturally this gave the place a bad reputation. The prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah capitalized on this reputation in their fiery preaching. Isaiah (30.33) said, “The sacrificial pyre is ready—it’s ready for the king!” Jeremiah promised an end to sacrifices in the Valley of Himmon—because it would be so full of corpses that no room would be left.

Because of the history of the Valley of Himmon, and because of the preaching of Isaiah and Jeremiah, the place became associated with judgment. The sacrifices brought in the association with fire, but so did something else. By Jesus’ day the Valley of Himmon was where residents of Jerusalem burned their trash. They had to take it someplace, and burning trash there was a good way to dishonor this place with such awful memories. When Jesus said the word ghenna, “hell,” an image immediately came into people’s minds: the burning trash dump outside the holy city.

Eventually the word ghenna lost its geographical reference. It became just a way to talk about how God would punish the wicked even after death. Two features lingered from its earlier usage, however: the image of fire and the idea of being outside. Ghenna, hell, was outside the holy city of Jerusalem when it still referred to the valley; and when it came to mean only judgment after death, it was imagined as a place outside God’s presence.

Second, we must see if Jesus’ stories about punishment pick up on the idea of being outside. I read to you earlier the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. This is just a parable, a story Jesus told to make a point. Notice, though, how the story describes the fate of the rich man. “In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away.” He is separated, distant. When the rich man asks for help, Abraham explains, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” The rich man is outside, distant, separated—with no way to get inside.

The four other parables Jesus told about judgment bear the same feature. In one (Mt 8.11-12), Jesus describes the kingdom of God as banquet: “I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” No fire, but note the key words “outer darkness.” Those who suffer are outside the banquet hall.

On another occasion (Mt 22.1-14) Jesus told a story about a wedding banquet. Those who refused the invitation and those who failed to dress properly got stuck outside.

Jesus liked to describe the kingdom of God as a wedding feast, so the alternative, naturally, was to be left out. This also comes us in the parable of the ten bridesmaids (Mt 25.1-13). Five were wise and brought enough oil to burn their lamps until the groom arrived. They entered the house. Five were foolish and had to rush off to buy oil at the last minute. They missed the groom and were locked out. Once again, the place you do not want to be is outside.

Finally, in the famous parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus warned what would happen to those who failed to help “the least of these” (Mt 25.41-46). The king commands them, “Depart from me.” And they go away.

From all of this we see that the key feature in Jesus’ teachings about hell and judgment is the state of being outside: outside the holy city, outside the banquet hall, outside the king’s presence. Jesus’ use of the word hell and the stories he told give us this understanding, which will be vital as we tackle the biggest question of all—one that anyone who claims to believe in hell must answer: Why would a loving God create hell?

It is a question not easily dismissed, and many have abandoned belief in hell because of it. We must somehow reconcile what we believe about hell with the loving God we know through Jesus Christ, and I think we can.

Why would a loving God create hell? I can only think of one reason: What if that is the most loving thing God could do? I know that sounds crazy, so try to stay with me. I cannot imagine that God would want anyone to be stuck outside. First Timothy 2.4 says God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” and I have to take that seriously because that is the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ. So why doesn’t God just forgive and save everyone? I do not know the mind of God, but I suspect it has something to do with the reason God gave us the power to make decisions and act in the first place. God’s desires our good, now and in eternity; but we bring bad upon ourselves, and God seems to honor our choices.

What I am trying to say rests on a few key ideas, and it will be helpful to state these clearly. The first is that sin hurts the sinner, not just the victim. When you lie, when you steal, when you hate—whenever you sin—you do something to yourself. I draw this conclusion from Romans 1, where Paul three times says God’s act of wrath against humanity was to do nothing. Humankind sinned, and God’s response was to sit back and “give them up” to the consequences of their sin. Sin is an appropriate punishment because it is destructive.

A popular misconception about God sees God as a cosmic cop who sets up arbitrary rules and then has fun enforcing them. But this is not true. Sin is not bad for no good reason. Sin is bad because it is destructive—of others and self. God has a good plan and purpose for us, but when we sin we get in the way of that. We hurt ourselves. Instead of being the people God created us to be we become something else, something worse. Sin is self-destructive.

The second idea is that not everyone might be happy in heaven. In C. S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, the people in hell could leave anytime they wanted. They even took field trips to heaven. But invariably, most chose to stay in hell. Going to heaven, you see, required them to give up the sin they loved so dearly. A proud man was unwilling to give up his pride for the glories of heaven. He could not see how small and pathetic he really was. Sin had blinded him.

My own view is similar to Lewis’s, but I start with heaven. Imagine heaven as a place or state of being face to face with God’s glory. Feelings of awe, exuberance, peace, security, and anything else good would fill your soul. But what if your sin took that away from you? What if you were face to face with God and all you felt was jealousy, resentment, and inferior? Martin Luther wrote that sin turns us in upon ourselves. What if even in the presence of God you could not take your attention off yourself? You would see yourself as worthless, nothing; and you would hate God. If you were consumed by your sin, heaven could be a miserably unbearable place.

Now put the two ideas together. The Westminster Confession says the chief purpose of human life is to love and enjoy God. What if your sin destroys you ability to do that? You would be unfit for heaven, unfit because you would never be happy there. You would be a fish out of water, a penguin in the desert. In that case, maybe the best thing God could do for you is put you outside. God wants you inside, but you won’t have it. Rather than see you suffer, God turns you out. Of course you would still be miserable. God is the source of every good thing. Cut off from that … well, that’s hell.

You may object that I am getting too philosophical, and I probably am. But I wanted to share with you how I have reconciled belief in a loving God with belief in hell. I had to try because scripture and the Christian tradition have given us both. Jesus himself has given us both. He told stories in which God is a loving father or a shepherd who will not rest until the lost sheep is found. He told stories in which God throws a banquet and locks some people out.

I believe in hell because I believe God has given us freedom to act and our actions have consequences. God does not force people to do the right thing in this life. Why should I expect God to do so in the life to come? I like to emphasize the positive. God has a plan and a purpose and a future for you. But I also think you should be aware it is possible to ruin it. That is why God takes sin seriously and has acted to save us from it. Left to yourself, you would not fulfill your destiny; you would lose everything.

This is where the Good News comes in. If you have read the New Testament, or many interstate overpasses, you know that Jesus saves. He saves us not so much from God’s anger as from ourselves and the consequences of our actions. He was on the inside, but for our sake he went outside. He took upon himself the consequences of human sin. He entered fully into our condition in order to rescue us from it. He heals our brokenness. Other people hurt us with their sins. We hurt ourselves by our own sin. Jesus heals us and sets us right. As the scripture (2 Cor 5.17) says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

When you trust in Jesus Christ and unite yourself to him in faith and baptism, God begins a work in you that culminates with you becoming the person God created you to be. Your destiny is given back to you. Your future becomes the one God chose for you, not the one you could have made for yourself. Scripture also says, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8.1). If you are in Christ, you need not fear hell. If you are not in Christ … well, Jesus himself says you ought to be afraid.

I still like to emphasize the positive. I believe in a loving God who is on our side. But I cannot give up belief in hell. Our actions have serious consequences. The idea that we can destroy our lives and our souls so thoroughly as to miss the fun of heaven is a sobering one. It gives us all a reason to pause and reflect on who we are and where our lives are headed. In the end, I suppose the matter comes down to one simple question: Whom do you want to be the architect of your future—God or yourself? The doctrine of hell reminds you that you might not do a very good job. Thanks be to God, though, the damage we have done is not irreversible, and through Jesus Christ we can still realize everything God planned for us from the beginning. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
October 22, 2006

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